Prince of the North

by Turtledove, Harry

  Some of his more conservative vassals grumbled at that. Drago the Bear said, “Who’s going to take all those spears away when the monsters are gone, lord Gerin? They’ll use ’em on each other, aye, and on us nobles, too, if we don’t watch ’em careful—and we can’t watch ’em careful all the time.”

  Having been through a similar argument not long before with Van, the Fox only nodded tiredly. “You’re right,” he said, which made Drago’s eyes widen. Then he went on: “But if we go under because we didn’t arm the serfs, we won’t have to worry about what we do later, now will we?”

  Drago chewed on that for a while—literally, for Gerin watched his jaws work beneath his unkempt mat of graying brown beard—then walked off without making any direct reply. Under his breath, though, he was muttering phrases like “newfangled foolishness” and “idiotic shenanigans.” The Fox refused to let that worry him. Stones changed more readily than Drago, but the Bear did as he was ordered.

  Getting spears and arrows into the hands of the serfs wasn’t enough, and Gerin knew it. They might kill an occasional monster, and would be cheered no end by so doing, but they weren’t fighting men. If Gerin wanted any crops brought in come fall, he and the rest of the nobles would have to ride forth and do what they could to hold the monsters away from the villages.

  Leaving Selatre was a wrench. That in itself surprised him; getting away from Fand had often seemed a relief. He took his sorrow on departing as a good sign: with luck, it meant he and Selatre had more to join them together than the pleasures of the bedchamber. Fine as those were, in the end they weren’t enough. You needed other bricks as well if you wanted to build something that would last.

  When he’d brought Elise up to Fox Keep, he’d thought they’d made something that would last forever. One thing he hadn’t yet known was that you needed to keep what you’d built in good repair. If you didn’t, it would fall down on your head. He’d have to bear that in mind this time.

  Such thoughts vanished from his head as the road jogged and Castle Fox vanished behind a stand of trees. “The monsters have been especially bad in the southwest,” he said, grabbing for the rail as the chariot hit a pothole.

  “That’s no surprise,” Raffo said over his shoulder. “They swarm into Adiatunnus’ lands and then out against us.”

  “No doubt you’re right,” the Fox answered. “Wherefores don’t much matter, though. Whatever the whys of it, we have to hurt the creatures badly enough to be sure the serfs can bring in the harvest. Fall’s not that far away.” He waved to the fields past which they were riding. The grain there was starting to go from green to gold.

  Van dug a finger in his ear. “Am I hearing you right, Fox? You of all people saying wherefores don’t matter? Either you’ve come down with a fever or— Wait, I have it. It must be love.”

  Gerin set a hand on the shaft of the war axe on his side of the chariot car. “I’d brain you, did I think you had any brains in there to let out.”

  “Aye, well, to the crows with you, too,” Van said. Both men laughed.

  As the chariots clattered by, peasants in the villages and out in the fields waved and cheered. They’d never been especially hostile to the nobles who ruled them; Gerin was a mild and just overlord. But they’d rarely seemed so glad to see armored men in chariots, either. Worthwhile reminding them we do more than take their crops and futter their women, Gerin thought.

  Toward afternoon, one of the serfs did more than wave and cheer. He ran up to Gerin’s chariot, the lead in a six-car force, shouting, “Help us, lord! Three of the creatures slaughtered our sheep, then ran back into the woods.” He pointed to show the direction they’d taken, adding, “Remon hit one with an arrow, I think, but it kept running.”

  “Maybe we’ll have a blood trail to follow, Fox,” Van said. “Give us a better chance to hunt down the cursed things.”

  The peasant’s eyes went wide. “You’re lord Gerin?” he said, and bowed when the Fox nodded. That sort of thing had happened to Gerin before. Not all serfs knew what he looked like, for years could pass between his visits to any one village.

  “Aye, I’m Gerin,” he answered, and alighted from the chariot. Van stepped down after him. They waved the rest of the cars to a stop. Gerin pointed in the same direction the peasant had. “Three monsters just went in there. The villagers managed to wound one, so we may have blood to follow.”

  “Fox, what do you say the drivers stay with the cars?” Van put in. “If there’re three of the things around, there may be more, and that’ll let folk properly armed fight for the serfs if monsters pop out of the woods.”

  “Aye, let it be as you say,” Gerin answered, which drew howls of anger from Raffo and the other drivers. He glared them into submission, wondering as he did so at the urge that made men eager to risk their lives fighting and irate when they lost that chance, even with an honorable excuse.

  Van pulled his mace from his belt and trotted into the woods, saying, “Come on, you lugs. The more time we waste here, the farther the cursed creatures can run.”

  Along with the rest of the fighting crews, Gerin pounded after the outlander. Sweat quickly burst out on his forehead. Running in armor was hard work—doubly so for Van, whose fancy cuirass was a good deal heavier than the one the Fox wore. But the outlander moved as easily as if he’d been in a thin linen shirt.

  “Here, hold up,” Gerin called at the edge of the woods. He was panting a little, but hadn’t ordered the halt on account of that. “Let’s see if we can find spilled blood. That’ll give us the way the monsters took.”

  Less than a minute later, Widin Simrin’s son exclaimed, “Over here, lord Gerin!” The Fox and the rest of the warriors hurried to him. Sure enough, blood splashed the grass where he stood; more painted the dark green leaves of a holly bush.

  Gerin and his men plunged into the woods. Along with the blood the monster was losing, they also had footprints in the soft earth to follow. They crashed through the brush shouting at the top of their lungs, hoping to frighten the monster and its fellows into breaking whatever cover they’d found.

  “There!” Drago shouted. He used his sword to point. Gerin caught a glimpse of a hairy body between a couple of saplings. Parol Chickpea, fast with his bow, loosed an arrow at the monster. It bellowed, whether in pain or simply in rage the Fox could not tell. Along with his companions, he dashed toward the place where it had disappeared. The men spread out widely, not wanting to give it any chance to get away.

  It sprang out from behind the pale trunk of a birch tree, almost in Van’s face. The outlander shouted in surprise, but kept the presence of mind to get his shield up and protect his bare face and arms from the monster’s claws and teeth. He smote the creature with his mace. Blood spurted as the viciously spiked head struck home. The monster snarled and wailed, but did not run. Gerin sprinted to come to the aid of his friend.

  The monster wailed without snarling when his sword slash drew a red line across its rib cage. Half turning to meet him, it left itself open to Van, who hit it in the side of its head with all his massive strength. The creature crumpled.

  “A stupid one,” Van said, panting. “The ones with the wit to wield weapons are truly dangerous.”

  “Even the ones without are bad enough.” Gerin looked down at the twitching corpse. “I don’t see an arrow in this one, either, so the one the peasant hit must still be around here somewhere.”

  “I hadn’t thought on that, but you’re right,” the outlander said. “Let’s get on with the searching, then.” He slammed the head of his mace into the ground a couple of times to clean the monster’s blood from the bronze spikes, then pushed on through the woods.

  Not far ahead, two cries rang out, one from the throat of a monster, the other a deeper coughing roar that froze the Fox in his tracks for a moment, as it was meant to do. “Longtooth.” His lips shaped the word, but no sound word, but no sound.

  The monster’s scream rose to a high-pitched squall, then died away. The longtooth r
oared again, this time in triumph. Gerin rounded up his companions by eye. Ever so cautiously, they approached the place from which the roars had sounded. Twelve men were enough to drive off a longtooth at need, though doing so was always a risky business.

  Gerin pushed aside the small-leaved branch of a willow sapling to peer out into a small clearing. At the far edge of the open space, the longtooth crouched over the monster’s body.

  “That’s the one the peasant shot,” Van breathed into Gerin’s ear. The Fox nodded; part of an arrow shaft still protruded from the creature’s left buttock. He wondered whether it had deliberately broken off the rest or the shaft had snapped as it ran through the woods.

  The question was irrelevant now; the longtooth had seen to that. The great twin fangs that gave it its name were red with the monster’s blood; it had torn open the creature’s throat. Longtooths, fortunately, were solitary hunters—had they traveled in packs, they would have been an even worse plague than the monsters. This one, a big male, was almost the size of a bear, with massive shoulders and great taloned forepaws almost as formidable as its fangs.

  It growled warningly at Gerin and the other warriors. The long, orange-brown hair on its neck and shoulders—not quite a lion’s mane, but close—bristled up to make it look even larger and more threatening. Its little stumpy tail, the only absurd part of a thoroughly formidable creature, twitched to show its anger at being interrupted over a meal.

  “Let’s kill it,” Parol Chickpea whispered hoarsely.

  Up till then, Gerin had thought Parol’s sobriquet came from the large round wen by his nose. The comment, though, made him wonder if a chickpea was what Parol used to do his thinking. He said, “No, it’s done us a favor. We’ll just go on our way and see if we can find the last monster.”

  Parol grumbled at that, but went along when everyone else moved away from the clearing. Gerin was sure the longtooth would be contentedly feeding for some time. All the same, he didn’t go very far from his followers, nor they from one another. The price of being wrong about what the great hunting cat was doing was too high to pay.

  Perhaps because the warriors stayed tightly bunched together, they didn’t flush out the last monster. After another hour’s search, Gerin said, “I fear it’s got away. The gods willing, though, it won’t be back in these parts anytime soon—and if it is, it may run across that longtooth.”

  “That would be good,” Drago rumbled.

  “So it would,” Gerin said. “A longtooth is more than a match for one of those things, or two, or even four. But if a pack of them set out to drive a longtooth from its prey, I think they could do it.”

  “Best thing to happen there is that they kill each other off,” Drago said. Gerin nodded at that. Somehow, though, things seldom worked themselves out so conveniently, at least not where he was concerned.

  The warriors made their way back toward the peasant village. When they came out of the woods, not only the serfs but also their drivers raised a cheer. The cheer got louder after Gerin yelled, “Two of the creatures dead,” and did not subside when he admitted the third had escaped.

  He gave Remon a silver buckle for wounding one of the monsters. The serf, a young, well-made man, puffed out his chest, stood very straight, and did his best to act like one of the warriors who’d accompanied the Fox. Gerin thought that at best unconvincing, but it seemed good enough to impress the young women of the village. To Remon, their opinion doubtless mattered more than his.

  “Sun’s going down,” Van observed.

  Gerin glanced westward. The outlander was right. Gerin suspected his friend had an ulterior motive for the remark—several of the young women had also noticed him—but decided not to make an issue of it. “All right, we’ll pass the night here,” he said.

  The villagers brought out their best ale for the nobles in their midst, and roasted a couple of sheep the monsters had killed. The rest. Gerin was sure, would be smoked or sun-dried or made into sausages. Nothing went to waste. He’d seen oaks in the woods nearby. No doubt the hides, however torn, would be tanned and used for winter coats or capes.

  Remon disappeared from the celebration with one of the pretty girls who’d exclaimed at his prowess with a bow. There was prowess and then there was prowess, Gerin thought.

  Several of his comrades also found themselves companions for the evening. As Van headed off toward one of the huts with a young woman, he turned back to Gerin and said. “You sleeping alone tonight, Fox?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Gerin answered. “Another cup of ale and then I’ll roll up in my blanket”.

  “All very well to be a one-woman man around the keep, Captain,” the outlander said, “but you’re not around the keep now.”

  “I don’t tell you how to live your life, and I’ll thank you for granting me the same privilege,” Gerin said pointedly.

  “Oh, I do, Captain, I do, but if I think you’re a silly loon, you may be sure I’ll tell you so.” Van turned back to the girl. “Come along, my sweet. I know what to do with my time, by the gods.” She went, not only willingly but eagerly. The Fox shook his head. Van had a gift, that was certain.

  Van also reveled in variety. Gerin snorted. “If I need a different woman so soon after I found one, then I didn’t find the right one,” he muttered to himself.

  “What’s that, lord Gerin?” Drago stared owlishly. He’d put his nose into the ale pot a great many times. He’d sleep like a log tonight, and likely bawl like a hurt ox tomorrow with a head pounding fit to burst.

  Gerin was just as well pleased the Bear hadn’t caught what he’d said. He did his best to keep his private life private. In the tight little world of Fox Keep, that best often wasn’t good enough, but he kept making the effort. And Selatre, unlike Fand, did not strike him as one to relish trumpeting her affairs—in any sense of the word—to the world at large.

  He glanced up into the sky. Only Elleb shone there, a day before full. Swift Tiwaz had just slipped past new, while Nothos was approaching it. And golden Math, almost at her third quarter, would rise a little before midnight.

  Math was the moon that mattered now. If she returned to the waning gibbous shape she’d had when Fabors and Marlanz set out for Aragis’ lands before the Archer’s chariots came north—if she did that, then all of Gerin’s carefully laid plans would go awry.

  “In that case, I’ll have to try something else,” he said, again to Drago’s puzzlement—and to his own, for he had no idea what that something might be.

  The sweep through the southern part of his holding netted the Fox several slain monsters. More to the point, it showed the serfs—and the monsters, if they paid attention to such things—that he and his vassals would defend the villages in every way they could.

  Parol Chickpea was the only real casualty of the sweep: one of the monsters bit a good-sized chunk out of his right buttock. Gerin heated a bronze hoe blade over a fire back at the peasant village from which they’d set out and used it to cauterize the wound. Parol bawled louder at that than he had when he was bitten, but the wound healed well. Then he had to endure being called Parol One-Cheek all the way back to Castle Fox.

  Two days after he’d returned to the keep, Gerin was up on the palisade when a chariot came streaking up from the south. He started worrying the instant he spied it: no one bringing good news would be in such a hurry. In any case, it was too early to expect Aragis’ men.

  He hurried down from the palisade while the gate crew was letting down the drawbridge. “What’s toward, Utreiz?” he asked when the chariot came into the courtyard.

  Utreiz Embron’s son was one of the leaders of the force holding the Elabon Way open through Bevon’s holding: a slim, dark fellow, a better than decent swordsman, and a long way from foolish—a rather lesser version of Gerin, as a matter of fact. He scowled as he got down from the car, saying, “It’s not good news, lord prince.”

  “I didn’t think it would be,” Gerin answered. “Tell it to me anyhow.”

  “Aye, lo
rd.” Utreiz spat in the dirt. “Bevon and two of his stinking sons—Bevonis and Bevion—came out in force against us, with monsters coursing alongside their chariots. For the time being, the road’s cut.”

  “Oh, a plague!” Gerin cried. The outburst spent, his wits began to work. “Bevander’s with us, though. That’ll help. Have our men gone south to pull Ricolf the Red into the fight? Having the Elabon Way blocked hurts him no less than us.”

  “Lord, my guess is they have, but it would be only a guess,” Utreiz answered. “I came north, thinking this something you had to know as soon as might be.”

  “You did right,” Gerin said. “So Bevion and Bevonis are the two who went with Bevon to suck up to Adiatunnus and the monsters, eh? And Bevander is on our side, as I said. What about Bevon’s fourth son?”

  “You mean Phredd the Fat?” Utreiz spat again. “The gods only know what he’s doing—he hasn’t the slightest clue himself. He could be trying to train longtooths to draw chariots, for all I know. He’s not in the fight, that much I can tell you.”

  “Too bad,” Gerin said. “I was hoping he’d come in on Bevon’s side. He’d hurt him worse by that than by joining us, believe me.”

  “The gods know you’re right about that, lord, but so far he’s sitting out,” Utreiz said. “Can you send us men to help force the road open again?”

  “A few, maybe,” Gerin said unhappily. “I’m stretched too thin as it is. I wish some of the lordlets on the land that used to be Palin the Eagle’s would do their share. No merchants will ever get to their keeps if the highway stays closed.”

  “I’ve sent men to several of them,” Utreiz answered.

  “Stout man!” Gerin thumped him on the back. “There aren’t enough people who see what needs doing and then go ahead and do it without making a fuss and without asking anyone’s leave.”

  Utreiz shuffled his feet like a schoolboy who’d forgotten his lessons and looked anywhere but at the Fox. Praise plainly made him uncomfortable—another way in which he resembled his overlord. “I’d best head back now,” he said, and climbed into the chariot that had brought him north. “You send those men as soon as may be, lord. We could use ’em.” He spoke to the driver, who got the horses going and rattled away. He hadn’t even stopped for a jack of ale.